Great career guide from 80,000 hours

July 16, 2016

At 18 I wanted to do just about everything: genetic engineering, run a luxury hotel in Europe, and, most definitely, cure cancer.

I got lucky and got a summer job in a cancer research lab at the University of Washington the summer after highschool, and quickly discovered that it was a lot of mouse dissection, pipette-ing, and grant-writing. Curing cancer is great in the abstract, but I really couldn't see myself living that day-to-day life.

Most of us have to make the big decisions without getting to try them out like that. And it's hard to get good advice about choosing a career or major.

The rather over-simplified advice, Follow Your Passions, is rampant, and often practically irrelevant to 18 year olds who have no idea what they're passionate about yet.

And at that age, you're often physically unable to hear whatever great advice your parents are trying to give you, because they are your parents, and how could they possibly know anything?